Reds’ Slow Start No Reason for Panic

One of the great beauties of baseball is
that one pitch can mean everything and one game can mean nothing. The
Reds are off to a slow start, winning seven of their first 16 games.
It’s not ideal and wins in April count as much as wins in September, but
it’s baseball — every team loses roughly one-third of its games.

Looking back at some other Reds teams,
the 2010 National League Central champion Reds were 7-9 after 16 games
and then lost their next two games. The 1972 team that advanced to the
World Series also started 7-9 and was 8-13 after 21 games. That team,
coincidentally, was two years removed from a playoff appearance (losing
to the Orioles in the 1970 World Series) and one year from a
disappointing 79-83 season. The 1961 World Series team started 6-10.
Even the 1975 Reds, perhaps the greatest team in the history of
baseball, were 8-8 after 16 games and had a losing record as late as May
16. Of course, there’s also the 1982 team that lost 101 games, which
was 6-10 after 16 games, just one game worse than the current squad.

You can even look at 2011 — the Colorado
Rockies were 12-4 after 16 games and finished 73-89. The Royals were
10-6 and ended up losing 85 more games. Even the Indians finished under
.500 after starting 12-4. After 16 games in 2011, the World Champion
Cardinals were 8-8, a game behind the Reds. And then there’s the Red Sox
and Rays — both teams lost their first six games. While the Rays
rallied to get to 7-9, the Red Sox were 5-11. Boston rebounded to lead
the AL Central, the game’s best division, on Sept. 1 before collapsing
down the stretch. Sure, if they would have started better, it wouldn’t
have come down to the last day — but you could say the same for the
Rays.

Does this all mean the Reds are going to
make the playoffs? Of course not.

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That’d be silly. But it does mean that
they haven’t been eliminated from contention.

So far this season, the Reds’ bats have
been more or less silent — the team has 53 runs, and only the Phillies
and Pirates have fewer in the National League. Joey Votto has just one
home run and Jay Bruce has a .262 on-base percentage. This won’t last
long. Talk to anyone about baseball statistics and the phrase “small
sample size” will be brought up — 16 games is a small sample size. You
can count on the fact Votto will have more than the 10 homers he’s on
pace to finish the season with, and you can be sure Bruce’s OPS (on-base
percentage plus slugging percentage) will be a lot closer (if not
better) than his career .801 mark than the .695 at the one-tenth mark of
the season.

And then there’s the pitching. Johnny
Cueto is more-or-less where he was last season, and while Bronson Arroyo
probably won’t finish the season with a 2.91 ERA, Homer Bailey’s 3.86
could be sustainable. And then there’s Mat Latos.

The centerpiece of the Reds’ biggest
trade in recent years has given up 14 runs in just 15 1/3 innings over
three starts, giving him an 0-2 record and an 8.22 ERA. What’s
interesting is those numbers fit in with his career trend. So far in his
young career, he’s 1-8 with a 6.28 ERA in the first month of the
season. The good news is that May is historically his best month, going
7-3 with a 2.41 ERA over 12 career May starts. Again, it’s a small
sample size, but it’s still worth noting that he doesn’t have an ERA
north of 4.00 in any month other than the first in his career. Latos
might not be Cy Young yet, but he will be better — and hopefully people
will stop trolling his wife on Twitter when he starts and she can get
back to Tweeting about the important things, like tattoos and snakes.

This team isn’t perfect and the 2012
season could still become a disaster, but we have several glorious
months of baseball on the Ohio River to figure that out. Trying to
figure out what’s going to happen over the course of the season because
of the results of the first 16 games is pure folly — there’s a reason
there are three strikes in an out, three outs in an inning, nine innings
in a game and 162 games in a season. One event can mean everything in
baseball and one event can mean nothing — what the first 16 games mean
in 2012 need perspective, something that can’t be gleaned in 140
characters or in April.